THERE is no 11th-hour miracle. There can be a miracle only past 12. It is called resurrection. That hasn’t happened since Jesus. While there is life there is hope. Where there is hope, there is politics and no need for miracles. The Department of Foreign Affairs alone gave a sober explanation for Mary Jane’s reprieve: a change of mind on the part of Widodo, the head of the government that set the hour and place of her death.
It is presumptuous to insist that prayers move God to correct the negligence of the Philippine government. Mary Jane’s case was old; no effort was made to find her recruiter and back up her defense that the evidence against her was planted. Indeed, no effort was made at all even after her impending execution became a national issue. Her recruiter turned herself in because her parents, quite rightly, threatened to kill her right after their daughter’s execution. This is the least that parents should do for their children.
The 11th-hour reprieve sent the Philippine media into orgasmic spasms of fervid anticipation of a telenovela until I insulted it on Twitter. It is a disservice to our country to encourage its innate infantilism. Every issue becomes cute. President Joseph Estrada—fondly called Erap, which is not an alias, as moron’s maintain, but a nickname alongside his real name—famously said, “Wag natin i-baby ang insurgency.” But we baby everything and turn it into showbiz. The Filipino editorial sense is baduy.
Mary Jane’s reprieve has a political explanation, and the credit for staying her execution goes only to Widodo. No one can share in it. Not Megawati, the chief of his party which he repeatedly ignores; not the activists who kept vigil even though “Wee-doh-doh” listens to human-rights concerns, not international pressure from countries that also impose the death penalty; certainly not God. No credit goes to any government that pleaded with him. None could make Widodo change his mind about carrying through a legal imperative of the Indonesian justice system for executions to follow convictions in shooting offenses.
Widodo listened to one thing only even if it could not compel a change of his mind. He listened to that one thing because it could serve as a good reason if he did change his mind. Changing one’s mind is a preeminently executive privilege but there must be a reason—in other countries but not in ours, where mental shifts are inexplicable and gratuitous.
If Mary Jane was shot along with the 8, despite evidence now available that could show she was innocent, it would condemn Indonesian justice as barbarous in the eyes of mankind. In no jurisdiction is planted evidence a criminal offense. The arrest of her recruiter, who actually turned herself in, gave Widodo the excuse he needed for a change of heart.
To credit God for the risk only Widodo took of disappointing his people’s thirst for stern justice will discourage him from taking the same risk again when the conviction of Mary Jane’s recruiter should reduce her sentence or give her back her freedom.
Not God but reasons of state, gave Widodo a further motivation to stay Mary Jane’s execution. The head of state of a longtime Indonesian ally had humbled himself to plead for her life before a minor Indonesian official because Widodo was unavailable. The embassy of that ally never flagged in its pleading for another chance to prove Mary Jane’s innocence. Our embassy never said, as Australia and the rest of the addicted Western world insisted, that death is too harsh for drug trafficking. It never conceded she was guilty. It never said that the punishment did not fit the crime. The Philippine Embassy merely insisted that Mary Jane is not guilty. When the real criminal turned up, Widodo had reason to listen.
Yet, Widodo did not spare her life. He delayed the day of her death until the matter of her guilt has been threshed out again. There were rumblings abroad that Indonesian justice has no sense of proportion between crime and punishment. When Widodo reprieved Mary Jane, he made a stronger case for the high quality of Indonesian justice by allowing new evidence to disprove her guilt. This is seldom allowed in the West, where judicial stability dictates that truth cannot stay the hand of death. A last-minute stay of execution saved Mary Jane for a wider and ampler Indonesian sense of justice. This may still take the form of her execution if the new evidence is unconvincing; or a reduced sentence if someone else is condemned to the maximum allowed under Philippine penal law.
Indeed, close to a miracle but not quite is if Mary Jane had been shot at alongside the 8 yet all the marksmen missed her. But mock executions have been done before; most famously to Dostoevsky in Siberia and Ninoy in Laur.
The real miracle here is that Mary Jane has kept up her spirits, held on to her sanity and maintained her composure in the repeated face of imminent death. But that is just the miracle of human nature—at its best.